


The Space Between Us

by germanjj



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF, Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: Boys In Love, First Kiss, First Time, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-10-30 04:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20808617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/germanjj/pseuds/germanjj
Summary: An award show. Not so distant future. Timmy and Armie meet again and what they feel for one another can no longer stay hidden. A love story in three acts.





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic in this fandom. Not beta'd. English is not my first language.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know these people, this is not a real representation of who they are, this is just me playing with their public characters.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Hotel. Day. Before the event. Armie.**

“Armie, are you ready?” The door opens and Timothée enters the bedroom, a smile forming on his face as he sees me, “everyone’s down in the lobby ready to go.” 

He stops by the door and I notice not for the first time today that his perfectly tailored suit makes him look like a model. Nothing as crazy as Venice, more subdued this time, but I still look at him and wish I was a photographer or an artist so I could catch his beauty and bring it onto paper in order to share it with the world and make everyone see what I see when I look at him. 

“Spilled something on my shirt, had to change it,” I explain, tucking the new shirt back into my dress pants. 

I watch him as he watches me, silently studying my every move, and I wonder if he realizes it the same second I do. We’re alone the first time in months. There had been texts and phone calls, of course, but both of us had been half a world away from each other most of the time and it feels oddly new, to be in the same room together. 

“Wait, let me.” Timothée chuckles at the sight of my undoubtedly crooked bow tie. He steps forward, adjusting the piece of fabric that had caused him to laugh and had given him the opportunity to dismiss the distance that had stood so weirdly between us ever since he first stepped out of the cab this morning, bag in hand, an excited but guarded smile on his handsome face. 

“There,” he breathes into the space between us, his eyes flying up to mine, beautiful and bright and usually filled with an open and joyous kind innocence I have always painfully envied in him. 

“What’s up?” I ask him when there’s no evidence of that joy on his face now.

“Nothing,” comes the inevitable reply and then a step back and a pursing of lips. 

I say his name, teasingly, tilting my head. It’s clear that it is a lie. His gaze is nervously darting around, avoiding my eyes. His hands are fidgeting with his belt loops and he’s biting down on his lip and I want to tell him ‘It’s me, Timmy, you can tell me anything, don’t you know that?’ but I don’t say a word. 

“I miss you.” He says like it’s secret he’s been keeping, shamefully, and like he’s been scared to tell me. 

“I miss you, too” I say after a beat because it’s not a secret. I have missed him ever since we left Crema, even more so since the press tour ended, and I know he had felt the same way because neither one of us had been too shy to tell the other whenever we spoke after that. 

“No, like,” Timmy continues, running a hand through his hair and he seems annoyed with me for not understanding, for forcing him to spell it all out. There’s something off about his voice, a crack that I’ve rarely witnessed and my heart speeds up at how distressed he seems. 

I miss talking to you every day, I miss seeing you right in front of me instead of on a screen, I miss being able to touch you, I miss. I miss kissing you.” He laughs at that, a painful sound mixed with a hitch in his throat. I helplessly watch a tear spill down his cheek and my heart pounds in my chest. 

“Timmy,” seems all I can reply. 

I want to tell him that I know what means. Every word, exactly as he had said them. I want to tell him that even though we had never kissed outside of what had been written on the page or what Luca had directed us to do, there had been a special sort of intimacy between us, a delicate companionship, and I miss it every day. 

I want to say that even though we had always touched as Elio and Oliver, sometimes I think about touching him as Armie and I wonder if that can bring back that distinct mix of familiarity and affection that we shared and that I’ve never shared with anyone before or since. A closeness that existed in its own right and could only be understood by two people in this world. Him and me. 

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” Timmy huffs as if he just realizes he is, wiping his cheeks and looking at the wetness on his fingertips as if he can’t remember how it got there. 

“I miss us too,” are all the words that my mind can form and that’s what I say to him when I move forward and pull him into a tight hug. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into my neck, damp words hitting my skin, making it feel warm. 

I wonder what he’s sorry for. Missing me? Crying? Loving me? 

“I’m sorry too,” I whisper, meaning the latter. Neither of us lets go, sharing this quiet moment alone in this room. 

Here, where no one can witness, where we can hug tighter and be closer than we ever would dare in public without having to defend it or present an explanation for my hand buried in his hair or his mouth resting against my neck and our bodies aligned from knees to face, a kind of hug that tingles in my whole body and nourishes me as if I had been starving for human touch and only now found the kind of nourishment that wasn’t stale and lifeless but rich and powerful in flavor. 

I know this kind of hug. Remember it vividly from Crema. 

A kind of hug that can get complicated and dangerous down the line if we’re not careful, if at least one of us doesn’t notice when it takes just that little bit too long, ands takes a step back, inviting back the distance that was needed, however cold it felt. 

I can feel the shift. I can sense the precise moment our embrace turns from loving and missing to. 

To longing. 

I don’t do anything. I can feel Timmy’s heart beating against my own, feel his every breath against my body until his breath is my breath and his heartbeat is my heartbeat. 

‘Call me by your name and I call you by mine’ 

Holding Timmy like this gives life to the words I have said so many times, breathes meaning into them I thought I had understood back then but didn’t until now. 

Timmy sighs, wet with tears, and then he wraps his arms tighter around my shoulders, pressing his nose behind my ear and slinging his leg around mine as if to get closer still. 

My throat turns dry. My heart speeds up and I wonder if it’s following his pace or if I’m the one setting the rhythm. 

I don’t do anything to stop this. I should. For his sake or mine I don’t know but years now we have been at this point repeatedly, dark nights and long phone calls and sunny, beautiful days that seemed too perfect to be true. We have been here at this very moment and seen it for what it was and stopped it every time. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes laughing at the absurdity of it. Elio and Oliver bleeding into our lives. What method actors we are. 

I’m not stopping it now. Don’t pull away, don’t break the contact. I’m looking at the turning point, watching it come upon us, loud and clear in its familiar warning, and I watch it go by undisturbed. 

Timmy’s breath hitches as I pull him up easily so all he can do is wrap his legs around me to not loose his balance and he holds on for dear life, as if whatever he does he can’t get as close to me as he wants.

I can’t stop him. I don’t want to. I feel exhilarated and angry and ecstatic and desperate as I pull him in, tightening my grip in his hair and he moans in response, open and honest and delicious and I haven’t heard that before. Not like this. Not even back in Crema when I had kissed him for hours with people surrounding us, filming so much of what they could show so little of. This is private Timmy, not Elio-Timmy and this is all for me and because of me. I want to hear it again. 

The buzz of a phone stops up. It’s either his or mine, it doesn’t matter. It is life pulling us back to reality, back to a world where him and I are not alone. Where my wife and his agents are waiting for us, where a red carpet needs to be walked and cameras need to be smiled into. 

Timmy pulls away first, slowly, getting his balance back and wiping his face. His cheeks are flushed red and even though I know I must mirror him I choose to ignore his blown pupils and his lush bitten lips. 

We have never been here before. Chalking it up to Crema, to Luca, to Oliver and Elio, there was this silent understanding that sometimes things got messy and heated and so we would stop, turn around, back to the start and leave it be. 

Now the line we had so carefully drawn in the sand lies broken and meaningless behind us. Now when our eyes meet, nervous and frightened and full of excitement and want, I see that he had seen the line too and with eyes wide open, had stepped over it right alongside me.


	2. Act II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone so mich for reading and leaving kudos and comments! I never suspected such a great reaction. Been a while since I posted fanfiction. So here's the next chapter.

**Bathroom. Night. Afterparty. Timmy.**

I’m finally alone. I enter the bathroom, one of five, and I’m choosing the last in the corridor, closing the door behind me, closing out the world outside with it, buzzing with life and excitement and fake happiness and real happiness, mixed to an unidentifiable mud I’m too tired and too exhausted to be able to tell the difference. 

It’s pleasantly dark in here. A toilet to the side and a huge vanity with thick, plush towels on top; I feel like I’ve stepped into a private room instead of what is essentially a nicer bathroom stall. 

I wash my hands and then my face. I came in here for the silence and to try to get myself back under control which I’ve failed to do ever since I stepped out of the cab today and saw Armie and saw him look back at me. 

I had forgotten what it was like. There is so much there between the two of us that I’m afraid to touch or that I want to selfishly touch but don’t know how and don’t know how much Armie is going to meet me in the middle of, so we both stay exactly where we are and stare at each other from a distance, basking in what we are and what we were and what we could be. 

There’s a soft click of the door that reminds me that I didn’t lock it and I don’t turn around, just look up and into the mirror and see Armie stepping into the room, a look on his face I can barely make out in the low light. 

“Hey,” I croak, weakly and soft, and I break our gaze. I hear the door being closed and the lock being turned and I tell him “give me a sec” and I want to reach for the towel to dry off my face but then I freeze in my movement as I feel Armie behind me. Not hovering from a close distance but curling against me, heat soaking through his body bleeding into my body. A loud gasp escapes my throat and then Armie nuzzles my neck, gently and feverishly all at once and then a wet hot tongue touches my skin and I’m gone. 

“Armie,” I all but whimper, not grasping what is happening, hand gripping for something to hold onto and blindly finding the vanity in front of me. “Oh my god.” I’m all breath and desperation and Armie keeps on licking, his ragged breath caressing my skin between little lingering kisses and the earth-shattering feeling of his tongue exploring my neck, what he can reach of my shoulders, the spot behind my ear. 

I stop thinking. Every conscious thought is pushed out by desire and I push back against him, rocking against his body behind mine, until I hear him echoing the noises I make. My hand finds his and I pull his right arm around me and let myself fall back against him. I turn my head just so and offer him more of my neck, tightening my grip on his hand and pushing it lower down my body. 

It is delirious. It is perfection. It’s what I’ve been thinking of, dreaming of, what I’ve been hiding away for so long. It’s what I almost confess to him every time we meet and every time I bite my tongue and swallow what I feel down so it can’t see the light of day and can’t change who we are. 

Until today. Until earlier when I’ve found my home in his arms once again and was not strong enough to hide my feelings. Now my whole body is on fire, my eyes burning behind closed lids, so much I feel moisture building in the crease of them. 

“Armie, Armie,” I hear myself chanting. I want to feel him, more of him. All of him. All at once. I turn in our embrace, twist just enough so I can offer more of me, so I can offer my lips to his, so I can give myself completely. 

I finally manage to move just enough so I can see his face. And then I stop.

I take a shaky breath and a sound escapes me painfully similar to a sob. 

“You’re drunk,” I whisper, shoving my hands between us and gently pushing at his chest. Armie stops then. Pulling back a bit, wobbly and still breathing heavily, still so beautifully turned on and hungry and close. 

“You’re drunk,” I repeat helplessly, my eyes flicking over his face, taking in those beautifully blown pupils, the lush and full lips I think about so often. “And I’m not.”

I watch Armie take a steadying breath.

“And I’m not doing this with you when you’re drunk.”

My eyes start stinging again. Different this time, and with a growing ache in my chest. His heart is beating under my fingertips, and I ache to touch, to caress and to bury myself so deep inside him I will forget the agony of reality, where I haven’t told him that I love him, not the way I mean it, and where he’s not free to be with me, where he’s not a part of me, even though he is and he just doesn’t know it yet. 

“I’m sorry,” Armie whispers. He looks stricken, embarrassed by what he did even though I wonder how much worse he will feel tomorrow when he’s fully awake and sober and remembering what happened here tonight. 

I let go of him, finally, and wriggle out of our embrace, ready to put some space between us. 

“I’m sorry,” Armie repeats. 

“It’s okay,” I say and don’t know if I mean that. “No harm done.”

That at least is a lie. I know it and I suspect he knows it too. This was one step onto a path I know both of us had always known existed, but which we had avoided to go down ever since. 

“Timmy,” Armie looks lost, standing in front of me, his eyes following my every move as if he is waiting for a sign that he is either forgiven or that he had screwed things up beyond repair. 

I can’t keep looking at him. I take my head in my hands and I’m rubbing my eyes, hard, trying to get out of the haze we had both fallen into. 

Then I face him again. “We’re good, I promise,” I say, half wincing, half laughing and don’t recognize my own voice anymore. “I promise.”

He hesitates. Then he takes another deep breath and nods. “Okay. Okay. I’m really sorry.”

With that he turns around slowly, and with careful movements, he unlocks the door and leaves the room.


	3. Act III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading, commenting and leaving kudos. It means more than you know. Armie and Timmy are the reason this story exists, you readers are the reason why it exists in writing.

**In an Uber. After midnight. On the way back. Armie.**

I’m not drunk anymore. Not much at least; what’s left is a stale, distant buzz humming in my head that is far too weak to match the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I had switched to water as soon as I had left the bathroom, downed glass after glass of it just to chase the feeling of guilt out of my body. 

I had fucked it up. I had blindly followed where my sober heart never dared to go and I had fucked it up. 

Timmy’s close. 

Enough so that I can feel the heat of his skin raise the hairs on my forearm whenever I move in my seat. He’s silent as am I silent and it feels as if we’re forced into silence by the noise around us, vibrating at a level that threatens to cut through our carefully built walls. 

I can barely believe how no one else seems to be feeling it or hearing it, but everyone from the door man at the venue to the lady on the phone walking next to us as we rush past her is continuing with their lives as if they can’t feel how the world is tilting on its axis, one drumbeat away from spinning out of control.

I risk a glance at Timmy next to me, careful that the driver does not spare us too much attention, and I watch him bite his lower lip, worrying it as if he could be drowning out the noise with another kind of pain. 

It’s a bad idea to be in the car with him. To drive back to his place and not my own hotel room. The one booked just two weeks ago, for me and my wife who is still my wife even if only on paper, never spoken aloud but recognized by the both of us. 

It is a bad idea, a bad choice just as it was a bad choice to hug Timmy in the hotel room and to kiss him in the bathroom and to look at him just as I wanted to look at him all the times in between. 

‘I’m heading home’ my wife had said. ‘Feel free to stay but I’m tired.’ She had looked at Timmy and told him ‘Make sure my husband gets home safe, okay? And let me know if he ends up staying at your place, so I don’t worry.’ 

Speechless by her proposal I had glanced at Timmy who had nodded and laughed and to the world looked as if her words had been nothing but caring and funny. I wonder now, here in the car watching the streets fly by, if she had said the words out of kindness or cruelty, not doubting for a second what it was she was proposing. I wonder what it says about me that I can’t tell, that I wouldn’t be surprised by the former and that I wouldn’t fault her for the latter. 

The noise grows louder as we stop in front of Timmy’s place and walk up the stairs to his apartment. It grows to a crescendo and I’m urged to cover my ears to escape it. It’s the soundtrack to my worst decision yet or my best one but it’s going to be one or the other, life changing no matter what, and there’s no third option where it will just fall down, anticlimactic, and go back to what it was before. 

“I’m gonna go take a shower,” Timmy says his first words to me since he had announced it was time for him to go home too and had asked if I was coming with him. I had just nodded. One glance at his eyes, open and hopeful and devastated, and I had not hesitated. The noise had started there. The thrumming, his heartbeat and mine, like a storm coming. 

I’m waiting in the kitchen while he showers. Neutral ground and far from where my mind wants to go. But even his kitchen is inherently Timmy and isn’t that the whole problem? Me, being here in his space where everything smells of him, looks like him, is fully and entirely him, and I’ve already entered, stepped into the space as if I belonged here, was welcomed to share everything that was his and everything that was him. 

I search for a glass, taking the one that is just drying by the sink and fill it with cold tab water, hoping it will help to clear my head. 

My mind is racing. I’m no longer numbed by alcohol but instead awoken to the moment. Dancing around the possibilities of me, being here tonight. And what it means and what it means beyond that. 

Timmy must have understood my wife’s implication when she had said her words. He must have understood my implication when I had agreed to come with him instead of finding my own way home. But was him, bringing me here, inviting me in, and invitation to more than just sharing his space? And would I, having followed the invitation into his home, follow the invitation to more as well?

I hear the shower being turned off and I return the glass to the drying rack and I turn around to where I can see the living room, sitting mostly in the dark, only illuminated by the faint kitchen light and the glow of New York outside the window.

And there is Timmy. 

Fully naked, not hiding in the shadows but emerging from them. He stops, a short distance away, and he looks at me open and honest and my mind falls silent.  
With it the noise goes, my fear goes, everything stills.

Timmy’s beautiful. In the purest sense of the word. His naked body like a blank canvass, breathtaking on its own but begging to be played upon, to be brought to life. Emotions are erupting from his eyes, from the way his hands flutter around his hips and the way he’s holding his chin up, high and proud and nervous all the same. 

There’s arousal clear on the sheen of his lips, the blush of his cheeks and the rapid up and down of his chest. Clear between his thighs. 

But there’s fear too, of rejection and acceptance, both equally devastating in the outcome. 

I take a long, shaking breath, wondering how much time has passed as I feel my lungs burn with the need for air. My eyes are glued to Timmy and I feel pride surging through me, pride that I know a man like him, who would, in standing before me without anything covering up his innermost desires, knowing that I could and should reject him, trust me with his whole self, body and soul, and therefore give me an offering that is far greater than this moment. 

I don’t reject him. Ever since we first met, that first kiss as Elio and Oliver, that first handshake, that first hug. That was me accepting what he offered. Every glance, every touch, every word spoken between us just pieces of a whole, broken down in bite sized timestamps, touches, thoughts, that are now coming back together in an intoxicating finale. 

I had always accepted him. Welcomed him into my thoughts, my life, my body. Him standing naked before me in his living room had been inevitable from the moment I had learned his name. 

I step forward, sure and unhurried, and I close the distance, the space between us, one last final time and I wrap him into my arms, lifting him up as easily as he was my own body, no added weight, just an extension of myself, and he wraps his legs around me and I kiss him like I had wanted to kiss him and I drink him in, marveling at how he kisses back just as free and open, as if we’re meant to be doing this, as if we had been doing this all along, as if there had never been an Oliver and Elio, but always an Armie and a Timothée.


End file.
